Art and beauty were closely linked for many centuries. Ugliness enhances beauty by contrast, as we see from many of the eye-catching works in the exhibition Bellezza e Bruttezza: Beauty and Ugliness in the Renaissance. Aesthetics did not exist as a discipline at the time, so Albrecht Dürer wouldn’t have been able to justify exactly why he found one painting more beautiful than another. His Four Books on Human Proportion influenced generations of artists. His contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci, distorted proportions to create his Grotesque Faces. Painters were free to exaggerate both beauty and ugliness.
Similarly, Renaissance music used dissonance as a contrasting voice. The ensemble Graindelavoix seeks the seed (the ‘grain’) of raw beauty in early music. Today, you find the interplay between beauty and ugliness in the debut novel of the Vietnamese American author Ocean Vuong, in his debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Beauty is short-lived. To be seen as gorgeous, you first need to be seen. Above all, Vuong wants to be seen by his mother, but there are many sensitive issues he cannot broach with her: his homosexuality, drug use and the traumas of war. So he writes her a novel in the form of letters, although his mother cannot read. There is a cruel beauty in that.
Today the beauty industry, rather than Venus, imposes ideals that few can live up to. Bodies and images are manipulated. These images are as unreal as the gods on Olympus. In Picture Perfect, artists rebel against constricting standards of beauty. Visitors will travel through time, from the sixties to the present day, across several continents. Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, Pipilotti Rist, Zanele Muholi and others reclaim the (female) gaze through their camera lens.
It was already clear to Immanuel Kant: as subjective as beauty may be, you want to share the things you find beautiful with others. Art is a form of recognition and acknowledgement.
